[TriLUG] OT: FS: dell powervault 630F array, 6 drives & one HBA

[Cristóbal Palmer]

Make me an offer (off-list, plz) for all or part of what's listed
below. I'm giving you the jump before posting to craigslist....

* Dell PowerVault 630F 1 gigabit Fibre Channel array.
* 6 matching Seagate Cheetah 36GB drives with caddies for the 630F
* 1 gigabit qlogic HBA (Host Bus Adapter). This is a 64bit PCI card
that will work in a 32bit slot.
* copper cable for the above HBA.

If you're hoping to geek out with this at home (like I was), note that
it's loud. Might work if you can stick it in the garage (wish I had
one). :) Also note that I've used a low-level scsi utility to reformat
the drives. They came with 520 sectors instead of 512 (something about
management overhead--the 630F is designed to sit behind a 650 head
that I don't have). I was able to get the thing working under Ubuntu
edgy as a raid5 setup once I switched the disks to 512, but it
required a kernel module that stopped coming with the default Ubuntu
kernel after dapper, which meant rolling my own.

Here's the utility I used:

http://home.comcast.net/~SCSIguy/SCSI_FAQ/RMiller_Tools/scu.html

And the entry from my wiki the process (note that I didn't have all
six disks at the time):

==final product==
is a 120GB logical volume dubbed delllv0 in the volume group dellvg0
(how original, no?) with an ext3 filesystem to be mounted at
/mnt/powervault (unless you have a better idea).

==how we got there==
based on [http://www.doki-doki.net/~lamune/computers/blocksize/index.html
this] I googled around until I found
[http://home.comcast.net/~SCSIguy/SCSI_FAQ/RMiller_Tools/scu.html scu]
so that I could try it.

after some stumbling, I managed this:

 # ./scu -f /dev/sg0
 scu> set bypass on
 scu> set device block-length 512
 scu> format

repeat for two other drives, wait an hour for the process to finish on
all three. Then try to fdisk the drives. Can't read them. WTF? tried
yanking the module and reloading. No change. Went into scu and did a
verfiy on *only* /dev/sg0 (this took about 30 min). Came back out and
magically they all worked.

stumbled through manpages to make physical volumes of the disks, a
volume group, and finally a logical volume. made it 120 instead of
133... thought I might want to leave room kicking around.

Cheers,
-- 
Cristóbal M. Palmer
UNC-CH SILS Student -- ils.unc.edu/~cmpalmer
TriLUG Vice Chair
"There are many roads to enlightenment, and thus many roads back to
the One True Debian" --crimsun